FARGO — Chris Sayre got fed up with the expectations of being a former long driver. Always expected to annihilate a golf ball whenever he was in a scramble, the ribbing finally got to him.
In 2012, the former Fargo South golf captain, began to train for long drive competitions. After just missing qualifying for the RE/MAX World Long Drive Championship that year, a series of injuries and family commitments kept him off the tee.
Well, the ball is back on the extra-long tee now.
Now 41, Sayre will be competing in the Ultimate Long Drive World Championship at Wood Ridge Farm in Lovingston, Virginia, in early October. The Fargo man has entered the 40+ Pro Men’s field and the Open competition.
Training since early this year, Sayre has increased his clubhead speed to more than 140 mph.
“I’m arguably faster than I was 14 years ago just from putting in more effort,” Sayre said.
That means he’s hitting the golf ball upwards of 400 yards. It also means much of his training — with weights or a golf club — happens inside on simulators. There might not be a driving range around that can contain his longest drives — or because he’s swinging so fast — his misses either.
“The difficult thing is there are no driving ranges where it’s long enough to hit golf balls without being afraid of the course just kicking me off or just hitting people,” Sayre said. “The misses can be pretty bad.”
The Ultimate Long Drive series is a bit more geared for amateurs compared to its counterpart, the World Long Drive competitions. Competitors try to hit at least one ball per round that stays within a grid that is 50 yards wide.
For Sayre to compete again, it’s a feat in and of itself.
After his first foray into long drive competitions, he helped open Golf Addiction, a golf simulator facility in Fargo, and later got a job at Microsoft. Family obligations took over as well and the injuries began to mount.
As Sayre said, “that time was not my own.”
A slapshot during a men’s league hockey game broke his right ankle. He later tore his hamstring in his left leg. He also tore his pectoralis major tendon that required surgery and it took nearly five years before he could lift any major weights.
“So just lots of injuries,” Sayre said. “With career, family, et-cetera, it took time to build all that back up.”
Chris Sayre, a golf long drive competitor, gets set up for a workout at Golf NXT on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026, in Fargo.
Alyssa Goelzer / The Forum
Now he’s training at GolfNXT, a multi-faceted golf facility in south Fargo. He’s reunited with trainer Alan Spriggs, a Fargo native who is now the director of performance there.
While there’s still the typical golf swing advice, Sayre’s swing training has a major focus on just getting faster and flexibility is a major component.
“We also heavily focus on getting deeper into the backswing and actually fully stopping before then generating speed with the body,” Sayre said.
At 6-foot and 212 pounds, Sayre is ripped, but not bulky. As GolfNXT owner Ross Uglem said, “guys that generate a ton of speed, they don’t look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
Uglem has been happy to see someone such as Sayre take advantage of his facility’s performance training, which incorporates not only a larger simulator bay that Sayre uses, but also its total body workout area.
“If there ever was to be someone pursuing this in Fargo, I hope they wouldn’t want to train anywhere else,” Uglem said.
With power and fitness certifications from the Titleist Performance Institute, Spriggs said golf training has changed a bit in the past decade or so.
“You know as we age, we have to probably attack things a little bit differently,” Spriggs said. “Speed is speed in golf so we’re working on strength, power, all the above. Mobility and flexibility, I would say if there’s anything different, we’re focused a bit more on that than when we worked together previously.”
During his training in February, Sayre’s clubhead speed was about 120 mph, which he calls his “cruising speed,” that he would use in a typical round of golf.
A few weeks into training, he popped the 130 mph mark. Somewhat stymied by the plateau, Sayre had what he called an eureka moment. While long drivers can generally swing the club faster when not hitting a golf ball, he needed something to bridge the gap.
He brought out a rubber ball and after an hour of constant swinging — to the point he was dripping sweat — he was able to put a real ball down and broke the 140 mph barrier.
His personal record in competition is 146 mph with a ball speed of 212 mph, “which is like good, but not quite where I want to be.”
He’s hit 152 mph in recent weeks using a lighter swing device and without hitting a ball.
It’s certainly not your typical weekend golfer swing. His backswing is way past parallel and like most long drivers, his follow through has his feet recoiling just to keep him upright.
“On a scale of violence for a lot of the swings these days in long drive, I’m still tame by a lot of standards,” he says.
His competition driver is a 48-inch Callaway model set to 4-½ degrees, which he can go up a degree or down to 2-½ depending on conditions. A typical golfer might play a 9- or 10-degree driver.
Sayre has jumped on the social media bandwagon, creating an
Instagram channel called MidLifeBombs
for followers to track his progress. Even with a modest number of followers so far, he said it keeps him focused to train and to post more consistently.
He’s posted his workout regime as well as several swing videos.
Sayre has put a lot of effort into not only strengthening his core but getting his muscles to work in unison.
“The club doesn’t care how strong you are,” Sayre said. “You try to recruit all that muscle and then fire as fast as possible to get the club to go faster and then the ball goes further.”